Romney May Not Hit Delegate Goal Before Convention

The presidential campaign of stumbling Republican front-runner Mitt Romney likes to point out that delegate math will make it very difficult for Rick Santorum to erase the former Massachusetts governor’s delegate lead before the convention in August.

But the Romney camp is less eager to acknowledge that there’s a good chance their candidate won’t be able to accumulate the 1,144 delegates needed for nomination before the Republican convention in August, The Hill reports.

So the three-plus remaining months of primaries will likely be a long, hard slog, according to The Hill.

"Any week like what we had Super Tuesday, what we had over the weekend, what we had Tuesday night with Mississippi and Alabama, is kind of a missed opportunity for both of them," Josh Putnam, a political science professor at Davidson College who tracks the delegate count, told the news service.

"The math was already pretty much impossible for Santorum [to surpass Romney], so it went from impossible to even more impossible. For Romney, it's just a missed opportunity to build a cushion."

Romney's problem is that he’s lost his aura of inevitability and that could hurt his chances of becoming the nominee should he fail to garner the magic 1,144 before the convention.